 Good evening neighbors. It's great to see you all. It's Monday, August 8th, 2022 at 5.25. This is the commissioner's corner on CCTV Live, and I'm so thrilled to be here. My name is Lucia Campriolo. I'm the recently elected school commissioner for Ward 5, which is home to Champlain Elementary School, and today I'm joined by my colleague, Kathy Allwell, who is school commissioner of District East, which is home to Edmunds Elementary School and Edmunds Middle School. We're so excited to spend the next 30 minutes in conversation with you all, and I want to remind folks that this is a live call-in show as well, and so you are welcome to call us at any point this evening, though I am noticing in this moment there is not a phone on the desk, so we'll see if we can accommodate that. The number is 802-862-3966, and in the event you have a burning question, and you can't reach us tonight, you are welcome to send us an email or call our personal phone numbers, all of which are on the Burlington School District website, and that website is bsdvt.org, and so I would encourage you to dial up that website, take a look at who your board members are in your local district or Ward, and reach out to us via that channel as well. So Kathy and I are going to spend the majority of our time together in conversation about BHS, BTC 2025. It's how we spent the majority of our time together last month, and I anticipate it's how we'll spend the majority of our time together on this program in the coming months, because this project is a huge deal. It's a huge deal. It's very exciting for not just the school district, but for the entire community, and so we're really happy to have this channel to bring sort of current project updates and bring the conversation right to our neighbors through this channel. I should also mention that in addition to watching live, you are always welcome to view this program at your convenience by finding us on the CCTV website, which is cctv.org, or on YouTube through an easy search if you search Commissioner's Corner So we'll make sure that we make those links available to you throughout this program and in follow-up materials. We're also going to begin embedding these links into the board website or the board page rather on the school district's website. So really want to make good use of this time that we are so graciously given monthly. So Kathy, before we dig into the conversation of our high school tech center project, it would be so fun to hear a little bit more about you. And I'll preface that by saying that Kathy and I are obviously new colleagues, and so it's really fun to spend a little bit of time with you in this forum. And it's just great to hear from you in your own words. You know, paint us a picture of Kathy Allwell, the community member, school commissioner, what inspires your service. Tell us what what comes to mind and what you're excited to share this evening. OK, well, I am Commissioner from Wards 1 and 8, and I've been on the board this time around six years. I was on the board back in the 90s with from Ward 7 and just six years ago started here. But in interim time, I moved here from Germany, my husband's German, and I have three sons. They all went through Burlington schools and they are all 39 and 240 year old, 40 and 41. And so they are fathers of their own kids, four of which are in the Burlington, well, will be the younger one is not in school yet, but the other two start pre-cave this year. So we are, we have been around Burlington schools for a long time. I also am a social worker by my by profession, and I did my master's in social work in Germany. So I'm really a social pedagogue, which is someone who organizes programs for and different age groups. I worked with all teenagers, middle school and teenage kids and have worked both in Germany and here in Burlington. And I started the New North End Youth Center in Miller Center up in the New North End, which was at that time under King Street, but then it moved on to Sarah Holbrook. So I've worked for both of them. And I have, I also started the after school program at Hunt Middle School. And out of that grew then what is today after school in all of the schools because we then went for a federal grant that paid for all of, for all of our programs. I also, you know, started a summer program for middle schoolers for all of, all of Burlington and Winooski's middle school age kids. It's a five week program still exists here in Burlington. So yeah, I've worked with kids my whole life. What an incredible professional and personal arc you have in all of the ways in which you have encountered both children and well, children, youth, you know, really all through up high school through your work as a social worker, but also in the schools yourself. And now serving as a commissioner, that's such an incredible breath of perspective and experience. We're, we're lucky to have you. And I always especially enjoy, you know, getting to know each of my colleagues who's come on the show in this, in this way, because it helps me understand and see as a, you know, colleague of yours where I can close gaps in my own knowledge because of other people's experiences. And so you obviously bring kind of a richness in that perspective, which is fun. I also will say, I share with you sort of the, I've got two young children, my youngest of whom is entering the public school system in just a couple of weeks as a kindergartner at Champlain. And so it's fun to move through those life cycles of students. And you've had the pleasure of seeing that now and will again with your grandchildren, which is exciting. Awesome. So I might already know the answer to this question just based on that helpful introduction. But if there was one thing that inspires your service most about being a commissioner, what might you say that is? Well, it's children, it's definitely children. I, I am of the belief that if we truly in this country would put children at the center of every decision we make, and I don't mean about school, I mean, how does that affect the next generation? Our country would look a lot different than it does, and it probably would be a better place for everyone to live. So my, it's children, but it's also especially children of lesser means because I have worked not only here, but in Europe and also in other parts of the U.S. as a social worker. And most of the time, many of the kids I was dealing with were poor kids. And I really think that we owe it to them to level the playing field. And if we can't do that, we aren't a democracy. Wow. I could not have said that better myself and it resonates for me so, so much. I think really it's an interest in equity and affordability and access that inspires partly, you know, partly inspires my service on the board. And I couldn't agree more. It's like, we know what, we know what, there's so much information out there. There's so much science and so much research that tells us what the right thing to do for children is. And if we begin to follow that research and, you know, use that data in a productive way, I think the world would look quite different. So thank you for sharing that. Fantastic. Is there anything else you'd like to share just as far as by way of introduction before we kind of move into the meat of the conversation? And it's quite all right if there's not. You've given us a lot already. Yeah. And I, you know, I'm 73, almost 74, so I could probably tell you a lot more, but we won't go into that right now. Fantastic. Well, that's great. We'll move on then to the conversation that we're here for today, which is the BHS BTC 2025 project. Again, we, because we spent a considerable amount of time talking about this project during our last segment, I will again encourage folks to dial that conversation up, which was a conversation that I had the pleasure of having with Polly Vanderputten, our colleague on the board who represents Ward 3, and she did such an incredible job sort of giving us some context of how did we get to this place? You know, how did we get to the point of needing this new school and in the position that we are in with the opportunity in front of us of passing a bond in November to fully fund the project in addition to some resources the district has already identified to put toward project costs? And she did that really beautifully and I think also pointed folks to a handful of resources that also live on our website that do a nice job of breaking down that history beginning with, you know, many years worth of conversation that landed on community consensus in 2017. And so I thought, would you like to just kind of touch on some of those milestones just between now and, or between 2017 and now around sort of the initial bond that was passed that took us to, you know, 2020 and moving out of the space and PCBs and everything. The Cliff Notes is great. Okay. I hope we'll leave it at Cliff Notes because it is probably a sad chapter and I think that we're looking at a very positive chapter going forward. So yeah, since in 17 we we did pass that bond and the wonderful people of Burlington stepped up to the plate and gave us a yes to that bond and a pretty sizable yes. And I think that Burlingtonians as a whole really do support education. And I hear very little negative about the size of this bond. People say to me, we need a high school and we know it's going to cost us. And so I'm getting off here. I got to go back to 17. So 17 we did the we worked very hard to pass that bond. And I think we got out into the community and made it clear to people how important it was to get that high school cleaned up. And little did we know that the PCBs that were in there were so high that it's almost a lifesaver that that we actually found them. Because if we hadn't been pushing to redo that building and they hadn't been wanting to build out front and go into the earth, they probably wouldn't have found the amounts of PCB that there are in that place. I mean, certainly they're in the building materials and in the building itself. So I see it as a stroke of luck. So every cloud has a silver lining. And this one I think for us is truly a silver lining. I am getting really excited about what we're going to do and looking at this new building and thinking about, I mean, I have three kids that went through that high school and they would complain about it the way it looks. So they're, you know, passing that bond, getting going with it and then having to stop immediately and send all of our children to Macy's to go to school. First of all, we had almost a year of them being online. I think all of this was very problematic. And so Macy's, I know it's not perfect in there, but really now is our chance to make this wonderful high school what this community needs. And it should be one of our shining stars here. I mean, it should be a place that the community sees as theirs as well, because it's not just for the students there, but all sorts of people can use that space. And that's the wonderful part about this, that it is a wonderful community space for everyone, senior citizens as well as infants. So I, you know, the whole gamut, I think. Thank you. Yeah. And so I think just to articulate that timeline in 2017, a bond of about $70 million was passed. And upon sort of that excavation process to initiate the work, the costs increase significantly. And then the project was halted because of the discovery of PCBs. The pandemic began. Students were relocated eventually to downtown Macy's. And I think we said, we talked about this a little bit last month, just how fortunate we are as a community and how so many members of the community and our local leaders and state leaders came together to make that site possible for us to even use. Because I just can't imagine if our students were still learning online after that. So yeah, and so that space is a lease that we have and it doesn't last forever. And we have the good fortune of moving this project forward as it's been conceived so far. One other piece I want to touch on is, and I revisited this quite recently was the video, which I'm sure you're familiar with, the Reenvisioning BHS BTC video, which was part of the collateral that was developed back in 2017 when that project was coming together. And what was so useful about viewing that was that it really articulated the scope of challenges in the current site. And so again, the drivers of this conversation were its lack of compliance from an accessibility perspective, sizable deferred maintenance in the multi-millions, and other aspects of the building that did not live up to a 21st century education for our students. And so before the PCBs were even identified, there was public will to make this change because the space that our students were in, that our teachers were in daily, was not adequate for the level of education we are committed to providing as a public school district. And so again, leveraging some of that work and that input that had already happened within that project, we quickly moved into additional layers of community input, extensive opportunity for community input to help shape the project as it is today. And I'm going to very briefly recap sort of where we've been over the last couple of months, and then I'd love for you to maybe give some highlights of what's in that building, what are we kind of expecting to see in that space, and how does the programs that will be housed in that space, how are they an improvement upon what our current space offers. So I want to begin by just articulating that back in April, we made a decision as a board, we approved the decision at the board to advance one of five conceptual designs. The least expensive of the conceptual design is still a very expensive project, I don't think anyone would dispute that, but made the conscious decision to choose the least expensive of those five conceptual designs with a budget of about $181 million plus another $30 million for site remediation. So about $210 million project. Since then, project costs have come down by about $20 million because the district has decided in partnership with some off-site partners to relocate about 50% of the technical center programs from the Institute Road campus to embed those programs within the site at the airport in partnership with Beta Technologies, which is incredibly exciting for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, because it is the student-centered decision to make. We're talking about programs that we call high-bay programs, which includes our aviation program, our automotive programming, our advanced manufacturing programming, and so the opportunity to cluster those programs together in a site that is community-based, that is closer to the industries that they serve, and also that is most centrally located for students who attend those programs is really an exciting opportunity and development just in the last handful of months. And we also have to say that Beta Technology is a very cutting-edge kind of science, and so it doesn't only have to do, I mean, that same science for kids to be around that, that can be used a lot of that in other areas. So it's also something that we'll maybe spur them on to look at new science that they could use with other areas of manufacturing and other things. So I just think it's a great place for kids to be, actually. Yeah, I agree. It is really exciting. And so that has taken the budget down to about $190 million, which I should say is inclusive of environmental and site remediation costs at the site, as well as construction and costs associated with construction. So from that $190 million, the district has identified about $25 million in a combination of federal emergency relief funds associated with COVID, a bit of capital funding that's been identified and repurposed to this project, as opposed to spending it on other buildings within our district. Because this is such an emergency, because this is such a priority, because we do not have a high school and must build one, and then a bit of anticipated budget surplus based on prudent fiscal management at the district level. And so then from that $90 million, we subtract the $25 that the district has identified, which leaves us with about $165 million, and that's the work over the next week that the board in partnership with city counselors and really under the leadership of the superintendent, Tom Flanagan, as well as partnership with the mayor will undertake in the next couple of weeks. And we've got a couple of milestones. In fact, several of our colleagues, again under Tom's leadership, are at the Board of Finance meeting this evening, where they will continue, have been continuing to provide updates along the way over the last couple of months, as we have honed the received, I should say, received more clear cost estimates on the project. And so that work and that partnership has been ongoing over the life of the project. And so what we anticipate the next major milestone I should cite, we've got a board meeting on Wednesday where we will make a recommendation on the bond amount request, approve that recommendation, have a discussion about what that amount should be, and then that amount will be presented to the city council and the mayor next Monday. At the upcoming city council meeting where we hope that we will come out of that meeting with a unanimous yes and consensus around that bond amount so that we can begin the work of deeper community engagement over the coming months so that we're successful in November because this project is on a very tight timeline. Again, we are working toward a lease that does not last forever at Macy's and so the reason the project is called BHS BTC 2025 is because we envision opening those doors in August of 2025 and I can't wait to be there for it. I can't be there. So Kathy, tell us a little bit about what's inside this campus? What's inside this building on this campus and what excites you most about it? I think what excites me is that it's organized. I mean, certainly the other high school was organized according to which subjects they were being taught in certain areas, but these clusters are there, they have, so say if it's science math area because I think it's three small learning communities that they're putting together in this and they'll be learning areas, small group areas for discussion. There'll be large areas where students can have classes so what we consider classrooms. There'll be also areas, I mean, I should go on and tell you more about it than each little cluster, but then there's a 750 seat auditorium with all the correct rigging and everything to do all of the theater productions, etc. There's a really nice gym, well there are going to be two gyms, one for the community and a practice gym I think it's considered and the other one is a full gym that BHS needs to play. Sports in, there is also wonderful music areas. What we know as library is really kind of central to this building. There are two stories of gathering spaces so for that can be used to eat in or kids can just gather to have small meetings if they want or talk to each other. There's a beautiful atrium that's open to the outside so kids can go out but they're still within the building so it's, I don't know, kids have had input into this, the community has had input into the design as well as the staff and so I'm hoping, what I've seen of it, I think this community will be very excited, I am about it. Yeah, I would agree and I think to kind of contain that context that you just provided which is so exciting to think about how it's going to come to life, it's about a 270 square foot building and we've got about, I believe currently the High School and Tech Center combines over about 1,000 students and so we are thinking about what happens commonly in communities when new buildings are built is that you see a slight increase in your student body and so anticipating a slightly larger student body to inhabit this space and really what's in that 270-ish square feet are the requisite programs to deliver a high quality public education for our community and that is our charge as a school district and so I think that while we are so excited because we've been so deep in the weeds on this conversation for so many months about how it will, the building will kind of bring our educational offerings in the space configuration up to sort of standards that would be most commonly seen today in educational spaces versus in buildings that were built over 50 years ago. We know so much more about the way students learn, about the way teachers teach, about the way communities interact with buildings and we've had the benefit of that level of community input which you described over many, many months to incorporate that feedback and to really design a space that is environmentally friendly, that is safe, public safety was a big concern for folks naturally as was the environment. And we should say that hopefully there will be geothermal, sun collectors on the roof, green roofs in order to keep the building cool and insulate in the winter so which are all costs up front but down the road we won't be paying as anywhere near what we have been paying for heating fuel and cooling and all those things. So I think the community is going to love this building. I think it's what we really need. Yeah, absolutely. It is exciting. I'm noticing that amazingly we are about three minutes to time. We just chattered so much which was a delight because we haven't spent too much time together in the last month outside of the many meetings that we spent together which is great, doing the work where the work happens. But I do want to mention there are just a couple of upcoming opportunities. I want to be succinct in flagging the decision points that are happening in the next couple of weeks. So again, this evening Superintendent Flanagan as well as several of our colleagues are at the Board of Finance meeting continuing to bring our partners on the City Council along in this conversation answering questions they have so that we find ourselves in a really strong position next Monday to visit with City Councilors and with the Mayor and formally request a bond to be placed on the November ballot and so the reason this happens as early as it does is because here in Vermont we make mail home ballots available to Vermonters who are interested in voting which is fantastic and so in order to do that we've got to have the language set this month so that ballots can be printed in time to be mailed out to folks and so that's the accelerated timeline that we're working on and we're very happy to do it. So again next Monday will be the decision, the firm decision on the bond language which we anticipate to be right around $165 million and from there or actually before we get to next Monday I also want to let folks know that on Thursday this Thursday evening at 5.30 for anyone who is interested we are hosting a very informal community gathering I'm hosting that in partnership with my colleague Ben Travers on the City Council who was elected to represent Word 5 at the same time I was in March of 2022 in partnership of course with district leadership and colleagues on the Board as well as Council very informal community conversation at Champlain Elementary School Playground if weather is not cooperative we'll be in the library but we're again looking to make it as family-friendly as possible and allow for children to enjoy the grounds at Champlain on the playground in the back as another opportunity to hear questions, comments and let folks know how they can engage and so again I would just wrap up with plugging a quick moment to Google BHS BTC 2025 the first link that pops up is the project website within the school district's website and within that you can look around at all of the materials that have been made available to the public regarding this conversation there's also an input form you can submit input via that website and you can also volunteer to help out I'm personally really excited to begin engaging more deeply with community members over the next coming months particularly as school comes back to session and summer is over and people are really dialing into the work ahead so that we have the enthusiasm and energy behind a yes vote in November so Kathy anything you'd like to close with? No, you've pretty much said it all but we do need the community to really come out and engage in this we want this to be a wonderful building that should be a home to everyone in this community so please move, come help us we need to have a yes vote from everyone Thank you Thanks so much, look forward to seeing you all next month